Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Kate Lyons: "'I love this': bid to discredit Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with college dance video backfires" (The Guardian)
Effort to embarrass freshly sworn-in Congresswoman fails after footage endears her to wide audience.
Paul Krugman: Who's Afraid of the Budget Deficit? (NY Times)
Democrats shouldn't put themselves in a fiscal straitjacket.
John Judis: Trump, the Democrats, the Shutdown and the Wall (TPM)
But if the battle now is seen as opening the government vs. paying $5 billion for the wall, and if the Democrats appear utterly intransigent on the issue, and indifferent to border security, Trump could win the political battle. That's something the Democrats should worry about. They are engaged in what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called a "war of position" - a slow struggle for political supremacy that will climax in the all-important November 2020 election.
Greg Sargent: Trump's reign of corruption will now face real opposition. Here are three things to watch. (Washington Post)
There's Trump's corruption of our institutions, which includes efforts to diminish public faith in our democracy and authoritarian attacks on the rule of law to skirt accountability. There's Trump's personal corruption and self-dealing, and his co-opting of GOP members of Congress as shields against oversight and accountability. There's Trump's corruption of our discourse with nonstop disinformation, which includes his daily, routinized lying but also the basing of consequential policy decisions on phony rationales saturated in bottomless dishonesty and bad faith.
Mary Beard: When to Retire (TLS)
I am rather looking forward to retiring in 2022. So I was a bit surprised to see a headline in today's Times (behind the paywall): 'Academics lambast Oxbridge over forced retirement at 67'. It is true that we still have a fixed retirement age (with a few exceptions for those who have very strong reasons to continue). But what the article in the Times failed to mention was that we had voted for that.
Mary Beard: Ultima Thule (TLS)
The BBC radio presenters had a bit of a challenge this morning. It was the Today programme's special feature on Outer Space and the big story was the photographs that had probably been captured of the furthest thing we've had a chance to examine in space: a blob of rock and ice, known as Ultima Thule.
Alison Flood: "'The drought is over': mass US copyright expiry brings flood of works into public domain" (The Guardian)
Legislation in 1998 extended copyright by 20 years, so this year marks the first time in two decades that the pool of freely available work has been added to.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
answered:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes
• For much of his career as a movie critic, Roger Ebert had a weight problem-he had too much of it. Once, he visited Sir John Soane's Museum at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, a museum that is known as "the most eccentric house in London." Sir John was a collector, and he collected books, brass buttons, coins, drawings, etchings, furniture, mirrors, oils, pistols, rifles, rugs, statuary, swords, tapestries, stuffed heads, watercolors, and writing implements. When Sir John, a great 18th-century architect, left his home to England, his wife said, "Now let them dust the bloody man's collection." In Sir John's breakfast room, Mr. Ebert saw a 17th-century chair, which was handsome and behind which (on the wall) was a card that said, "Have a seat on me!" Mr. Ebert prepared to take a seat, but a museum guard told him, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, sir!" Mr. Ebert protested, "But it says to have a seat!" The guard replied, eying Mr. Ebert's sizable figure, "And so it does. But it's not for the likes of you!" In addition, Mr. Ebert once visited Bangkok, Thailand, where he saw a tailor shop with this sign in a window: "Fine Linen Summer Suit Made to Measure-$80." He went inside to inquire whether the sign were correct, and the proprietor looked at Mr. Ebert's sizable figure and said, "Well … it 80 dollars suit, sure enough. But you-hundred dollar man." Mr. Ebert says, "It was a great deal. For $100, I got a handsome white linen suit that fit me, and a story I could tell every time I wore it."
• In December 2009, Alexandra Shulman, the editor of Vogue in England, weighed about 10 pounds more than she wanted to, although this was not anything that she was really concerned about. However, excess weight is something that her father was prone to, and when she was young, he worried that she might become so chunky that she would find it difficult to find a husband. (Now she is divorced and has a child.) When she was attending St Paul's Girls' school, the headmistress announced publicly (all of Alexandra's schoolmates heard the headmistress), "Alexandra Shulman's mother has said she is not to have potatoes." When her father was seriously ill, in the intensive ward, she visited him, and he called out to her in a very robust voice, "God, Alexandra, you've put on weight." She immediately thought, "OK, he isn't going to die yet."
• Salvatore Baccaloni, a comedian in basso roles, was a huge man, weighing in at 325 pounds. During the mid-1950s, he confessed that the saddest day of his life was when his doctor placed him on a diet that stressed consumption of fruits and vegetables. What was the happiest day of his life? When he went off the diet. On that day, he enjoyed himself by consuming four pizzas, a meal with three kinds of meat, and one-half pound of a dessert cheese - Italian, of course.
• Ohio farmboy Denton Tecumseh Young had a fastball so speedy that he became known as "Cyclone" Young, which later was shortened to Cy Young. He was quite a pitcher, winning 30 or more games five seasons in a row, and winning 20 or more games 14 seasons in a row. When he retired, he had won 511 games. He could still pitch extremely well, but he decided to quit because he could not field bunts-he had grown too fat!
• Pablo Neruda and Rafael Alberti were both portly poets. They used to take walks together in Paris along the Seine and would use a complete set of the works of Victor Hugo in a bookstore to measure their girth. Mr. Alberti might say, "Good Heavens! I have already outgrown Volume V of Les Misérables!" And Mr. Neruda might reply, "I haven't put on weight. My paunch juts out only as far as Notre-Dame de Paris."
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
It's getting scary, folks. It's one thing to fear that he's deranged enough to stage a coup by declaring a national emergency.
But now he's talking about actually doing it! He's going to use the pretext of terrorists at the southern border to do it and get his damnable wall built.
He actually already has his lawyers, minions, and supporters looking into how he can use those powers of declaring a national emergency!
We're only one temper tantrum away from his doing it as a complete coup d'etat and crowning himself emperor (David's fabulous painting).
I will never kiss his ring! They'll have to haul me away kicking, biting, clawing, and screaming. They'll have to kill me. I am NOT going to stand by and do nothing when he does this. If those spineless Congressmen do nothing to preserve our country, I'll fight! I will not submit to a dictator!
Nancy ascends
Cheeto, however, will still wonder why his 'all alone at Xmas' schtick didn't work...particularly, since it only accentuated the fact that, like Nancy, he has five kids & an assortment of grands - none of whom chose the pleasure of his company during their cherished holiday season. Hmmm...
I wonder if the ghost of Christmas future visited to give him a tour of federal prison.
I wasn't going to watch the SOTU this year, but I just can't resist getting to see President Unindicted Coconspirator having to greet "Madam Speaker."
Is it too soon to talk about the line of succession?
Please please please may Nancy Pelosi become the first female President. She radiates love for others and is intellectually brilliant. Moreover, she is tough when she has to deal with self serving amoral imbeciles such as the orange shitgibbon (whom she destroyed in the moronic inferno of that live TV thang...i.e. when she railroaded wallbaby into boasting about being proud to shutdown the federal government). Love her.
Nancy looks lovely tan and well rested perfectly fit to bring Trump to his knees.
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Buddy, the resident orange cat, hates aluminum foil.
He reacts to the sound of it being ripped from the roll, or shaken, or waded up.
He has no reaction to parchment paper or wax paper or wrapping paper being ripped from a roll, or shaken, or waded up.
Just foil. And he really hates it.
Confirms Jay and Silent Bob Reboot
Kevin Smith
In what is undoubtedly the first piece of excellent news of 2019, Kevin Smith has confirmed that Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is in the works.
Smith is developing the film - which is actually called Reboot, as opposed to being a reboot itself - with producer Jordan Monsanto, having previously teased it back in 2017.
On New Year's Day, Smith said in a tweet: "Spent the first day of 2019 having a #JayAndSilentBobReboot pre-pre-production meeting at our holiday-roomy @WeWork office.
Jason Mewes and Smith first appeared as Jay and Silent Bob respectively in 1994's Clerks. They subsequently appeared in Smith's films Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma, before getting their very own spin-off, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, in 2001.
Kevin Smith
To End After Season 6
'Vikings'
History's flagship scripted series Vikings will be ending its run after the upcoming 20-episode sixth season.
As the hit drama is wrapping, History, Vikings creator Michael Hirst and studio MGM Television, are looking to extend the Vikings franchise with a new series. I've learned that the network is in talks with MGM and Hirst about a new series from the same creative team as the original series, which would continue the Vikings saga. If the offshoot project, which is in early stages, moves forward, Hirst will be joined by feature writer Jeb Stuart (Die Hard, The Fugitive).
Vikings, which will end its run after a total of 89 episodes, is currently halfway through airing the back 10 episodes of its 20-episode fifth season, with the finale slated for Jan. 30. The series recently wrapped production on the final sixth season, which is expected to debut later this year, with the last episodes likely airing in 2020. A rep for History confirmed to Deadline that Vikings is coming to an end, providing no further details.
Created and executive produced by Hirst, who has written every episode, Vikings has been a legacy show for History. It marked the network's first foray into ongoing scripted series. Vikings was a breakout ratings hit when it debuted in 2013 and remains History's #1 scripted series of all time, successfully overcoming a number of cast changes, including the exit of original lead, Travis Fimmel, whose character Ragnar Lothbrok's story arc came to an end in Season 4. Its most recent episode finished No.2 in 18-49 and No.3 in total viewers among all cable originals last week with 2.7 million total viewers, 895,000 of them adults 18-49 (L+3).
'Vikings'
Cancels Vegas Residency
Britney Spears
Britney Spears has canceled her 2019 Las Vegas residency and is going on an "indefinite work hiatus" in order to put "full focus" on her father's health.
"Britney: Domination" was scheduled to begin on Feb. 13, but on Jan. 4, the pop star unexpectedly posted a personal note alongside a childhood photo with her parents, Jamie and Lynne Spears.
"I don't even know where to start with this, because this is so tough for me to say," she began. "I will not be performing my new show Domination. I've been looking forward to this show and seeing all of you this year, so doing this breaks my heart. However, it's important to always put your family first… and that's the decision I had to make."
Spears continued, "A couple of months ago, my father was hospitalized and almost died. We're all so grateful that he came out of it alive, but he still has a long road ahead of him. I had to make the difficult decision to put my full focus and energy on my family at this time. I hope you all can understand."
A press release went into further detail about her father's condition, confirming that two months ago, Jamie's colon spontaneously ruptured. After undergoing immediate emergency surgery, he spent the following 28 days in a Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas.
Britney Spears
Disturbing Details
R. Kelly
Despite R. Kelly's threatening to sue Lifetime, the documentary series Surviving R. Kellypremiered Thursday night, with details shining a disturbing new light on his alleged physical abuse, sexual relations with teenage girls and infamous marriage to Aaliyah.
Kelly's former backup singer Jovante Cunningham discussed meeting Aaliyah when she was just 12. "We taught her her street thing, we gave her her vibe," Cunningham said. "She went from wearing fitted clothes to the baggy jeans with the half shirts, with the baseball caps. We taught her how to be an artist in the sense of having a stage presence. We would sneak Aaliyah out of the hotel."
Cunningham went on to reveal that one night when they were on the road with Aaliyah, then 15, "the door flew open on the bus - Robert was having sex with Aaliyah." Through tears, she said, "I feel protective of Aaliyah right now, which is why I can't get my mouth to say … he destroyed a lot of people."
Kelly's former tour manager and assistant, Demetrius Smith, said Kelly came to him first when he was worried that he had impregnated Aaliyah. Smith also acknowledged that he was in the room when the two secretly married and that he had forged the paperwork stating that Aaliyah was 18 when in fact she was only 15.
"I was so disappointed in him, 'cause I really believed him when he said … he wasn't doing and messing with Aaliyah," said Smith, who admitted that he's "not proud" of forging the documentation. "Aaliyah looked worried. Scared. Worried and scared. I wanted so much to grab Aaliyah and talk to her. … She gave me a look like she wanted me to talk to her. That's why I feel like I failed them, both of them. I knew that it had changed the course of everything."
R. Kelly
Administration Officials Are Getting Raises
Shutdown
The government has been operating under a partial shutdown since December 21st, depriving 800,000 federal employees of their entire paychecks. Meanwhile, hundreds of senior Trump appointees are getting $10,000 raises, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
This was an accident. Maybe. In 2013, Congress passed a law capping the salaries of federal executives. The law has been renewed every year, but it wasn't in 2018 because of the shutdown. The pay freeze will expire unless action is taken by Saturday. This will not happen, and so starting next week, everyone from cabinet secretaries to Vice President Mike Pence will see bumps in their paychecks. The raises were revealed in documents released by the Office of Personnel Management, which last week advised workers who won't be seeing paychecks because of the shutdown to do manual labor for their landlords in lieu of paying rent.
The raises are just one of many side effects of Trump's decision to hold the government hostage over a border wall, and he doesn't appear to be letting it go anytime soon. His meetings with congressional Democrats have not been productive, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reminded reporters Friday afternoon.
But it's unclear whether the president even knows that hundreds of his top appointees are getting raises while the government is shut down, or if he even cares. The Office of Personnel Management is certainly aware of it, as they discussed ways to remedy the issue - or at least its negative optics - with the Office of Management and Budget on a conference call Monday morning.
"It was definitely a 'this is not going to look good' situation,'" one participant told the Post.
Shutdown
Recommended For Parole
Beausoleil
A California parole board recommended Thursday that an acolyte of cult leader and mass murderer Charles Manson be set free, media reports said.
Manson follower Robert Beausoleil, 71, has served nearly half a century for a conviction in the 1969 slaying of musician Gary Hinman, who was tortured for three days before his death, previous court hearings and news accounts said.
Beausoleil was not involved in the so-called Manson Family's most notorious murders, the slaying of actress Sharon Tate and six others, also in 1969. The actress was the pregnant wife of filmmaker Roman Polanski. She was stabbed 16 times by cult members.
Parole panels have ruled against releasing Beausoleil 18 times before, the Associated Press reported.
California's incoming governor, Gavin Newsom, now has the choice of allowing the convicted killer to go free or blocking the panel's decision.
Beausoleil
Plants and Animals
The Moon
China's Chang'e-4 lander touched down on the far side of the moon (Jan. 3 Beijing time, Jan. 2 US), and it's got some living things on board.
A small "tin" in the lander contains seeds of potatoes and rockcress (Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, as well as a model organism for plant biology), as well as silkworm eggs. The idea, according to a report in The Telegraph earlier this year, is that the plants will support the silkworms with oxygen, and the silkworms will in turn provide the plants with necessary carbon dioxide and nutrients through their waste. The researchers will watch the plants carefully to see whether the plants successfully perform photosynthesis, and grow and bloom in the lunar environment.
"We want to study the respiration of the seeds and the photosynthesis on the moon," Xie Gengxin, chief designer of the experiment, told Xinhua, a Chinese state-run news agency.
The "biosphere" experiment was the product of a collaboration between 28 Chinese universities, led by southwest China's Chongqing University, according to Xinhua. The experiment, which is tucked inside a 1.4-pint (0.8 liters) aluminum alloy cylinder, weighs about 7 lbs. (3 kilograms) and includes dirt, nutrients and water. Sunlight will filter into the container through a "tube," and small cameras will watch the little environment. That data will beam back to Earth by means of the complicated relay system China has set up to communicate with an experiment that has no direct line of sight to Earth.
Rockcress has been grown in space before, including in one experiment on the International Space Station that showed the plants' leaves appearing to rise and fall as they detected the moon's gravity. But whether the flowering plant will flourish in the environment of the far side of the moon remains an open question.
The Moon
Sea Ice In Record-Low Territory Again
Antarctic
What's happening to Arctic sea ice is pretty straightforward: Earth is getting warmer, and everything's melting. But on the other side of the planet, things are more complicated, as evidenced by the latest Antarctic sea ice slump that has scientists scratching their heads.
Antarctica rang in the new year with record-low levels of sea ice, according to an update released Thursday by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSDIC). On January 1, sea ice covered a paltry 2.11 million square miles of water in the Southern Ocean rimming the continent, which is 726,000 square miles below the long-term average for that date. This bizarre start to 2019 followed the most rapid December surge of sea ice loss on record, causing the Antarctic to eclipse record lows set just two years back, in the austral summer of 2016-2017.
"Notably, the November to December 2016 period was considered an extreme excursion of Antarctic sea ice at the time," the NSDIC wrote.
You might think: Duh, this is climate change. And that could be part of it! But an analysis conducted after the 2016-2017 sea ice crash-which culminated in a record seasonal sea ice minimum in March 2017-concluded that a spate of freak weather coinciding with an extremely negative phase of the Southern Annular Mode, where the westerly winds circling the continent migrate north, was to blame.
In short, scientists pinned the last sea ice nosedive on natural variability. But it's currently unclear what's behind this year's ice crash. Notably, University of Washington sea ice researcher Cecilia Bitz told Earther that the Southern Annular Mode is not strongly negative at the moment. Nor are we still nursing the hangover of a monster El Niño, as we were at the end of 2016.
Antarctic
The Physics Of Fluids
Marathon Runners
Marathoners queuing up for a big race tend to go with the flow, surging toward the start line like a fluid.
Using footage of runners moving in groups toward the start of the Chicago Marathon, researchers developed a theory that treats the crowd like a liquid to explain its movement. The theory correctly predicted the motion of crowds of runners at marathons in two other locations, physicists report in the Jan. 4 Science.
Previous studies have devised rules for how individuals act within a crowd and used that behavior to describe crowd motion (SN: 1/10/15, p. 15). But to understand how wine swirls in a glass, you don't need to know the behavior of each molecule. So physicists Nicolas Bain and Denis Bartolo of École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France considered the crowd as a whole.
At the start of a marathon, runners arrange themselves into groups known as corrals, which individually advance to the starting line. Marathon staff members form a line in front of each corral, periodically holding participants back until there's space to move forward. The researchers filmed this start-and-stop process at four marathons, including the Chicago Marathon in 2016 and 2017. The movements of the staff set off a change in crowd density and speed that traveled through the throng akin to waves produced when water is pushed, the team found. Similar effects occurred at marathons in Paris and Atlanta in 2017.
Marathon crowds are a special type in that everyone travels in the same direction. Eventually, this type of research could lead to new insight into other crowd formations, including those packed more tightly than marathon crowds, with pedestrians literally shoulder to shoulder. Such crowds sometimes result in deadly stampedes, such as the 2015 event at the hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (SN: 4/7/07, p. 213). Better understanding of these crowd dynamics could help prevent similar tragedies.
Marathon Runners
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
